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Tag Archives: #CallOut

Call out culture is the act used by radicals, progressives and activist to call out instances or recurring patterns of oppressive Language. The act is a verbal outcry against abusive words and behaviour, within a public forum. the concept is to call out the people or individual using sexist, racist, ableist langue and engage in discourse with them about the moral implications of their words. This tactic is utilised by the hard left and is used to target and shame those whose dialect reinforce oppression. Whether Racial slang or out right bigoted words, The left uses this tactic to hold people accountable for the words they say.

Critics have painted call out culture as a caricature. The Right wing have labelled it as censorship and an attempt of silencing them, while the centre have depicted it as the abusive left with their purist ideology. This description is a farce and a knee jerk reaction to change within the status quo. The practice of this culture is not in silencing or banning words, but in acknowledging the fact, that oppressive speech not only has an impact on the individuals its targeted at physiologically, but can materialise into bias within society itself. Unlike the Centre, the Left does not feel like it has to pander to the hateful, rather it would prefer to educate and challenge it instead.

The purpose of the act of call out culture is to diminish bias and hate speech within everyday speech, and to liberate those who are shunted by careless acts of verbal abuse. It is an attempt to stop such language and the ideology that comes with it from taking material forms within communities, while stopping hate speech from becoming normalised within our spoken languages. The point is to ensure sexism, racism etc are challenged consistently to show that such things are not tolerated within truly equal societies. This is not about smugness and how pure your beliefs are. It is about accepting we are human and fallible to historical and cultural materialism as well as our environment.

We should be able to better ourselves through each other and while the individualist denies this prospect, Leftists see it as communal defiance against unethical behaviour and language. It is a tool to dismantle dominant trends and bourgeois ideologies that inflict harm onto others.